1. Field of the Invention
The technical scope of the present invention is that of techniques to produce tissue arrays.
2. Description of the Related Art
The tissue array is a technique to mount sections of biological tissues onto microscope slides for their future visual or electronic analysis. The tissue array technique enables a large number of tissue sections to be mounted onto the same slide contrary to the technique traditionally practiced in pathology laboratories where only one to three sections may be mounted together.
The tissue array techniques consist in taking one or several cores from several dozen, or even several hundred, different blocks containing tissue samples either embedded in paraffin or frozen. All the cores are then assembled in a paraffin block or in a frozen inclusion milieu in which recesses have been made.
The tissue array technique is well known and requires no further description here.
Reference may be made, for example, to patent U.S. Pat. No. 6,103,518 which describes a core sampling device. The embodiment proposed is complicated and based on an arm that is pivoted to successively bring into a working position two sampling punches. The rotation of one punch to the other requires the perfect alignment of the two punches above the core sampling position. Moreover, the position of the donor block support platform must be modified at every operation thereby making the use of such a device both slow and cumbersome.